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America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded Computer Sciences Corp. a fifth consecutive option year of a contract to run supercomputing operations for the space agency, NASA announced Tuesday.

Under this contract, CSC will continue to service NASA's primary high-performance computing facility, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and may service other NASA computing centers as well.

The contract is expected to be worth about $62 million to CSC, and will run from this coming Aug. 1 through July 31, 2014 -- and perhaps longer than that. The contract underlying this week's option exercise was originally awarded back in 2007 for a two-year base period, but it contains options to extend its length in one-year intervals -- as many as eight times. This week's award makes it five extensions down, and perhaps three more to go.

NASA notes that if all options are ultimately exercised, this contract could be worth as much as $597 million total to CSC.